Fun to join Ira Flatow to talk about some of the tech stories coming out of the Winter Olympics in Sochi. Thanks for having me, and to the SciFri crew for putting the interview up on Soundcloud so I can share it here.

Want to read some of the best magazine writing of the year? Here are the writing finalists for the 2010 National Magazine Awards, with links to the stories online. Perfect for Instapaper!
Links are to full text and print friendly versions, where available. If you find stories that I didn't, please let me know in comments.

What's a logical new venue for Bloomberg LP, and it's massive expertise in manipulating and analyzing financial data? Well, how about baseball? Kinda makes a weird sort of sense, if you think about it.

Couching baseball in the language of Wall Street is an easy leap. [Bloomberg president Daniel] Doctoroff, during an interview in Bloomberg’s Manhattan headquarters last week, said, “If you think of players as securities and teams as portfolios, then our infrastructure for managing information about securities and portfolios could be adapted to sports.”

Full details at the NY Times. This is interesting--is there enough of a market for Bloomberg to make money here? And, dear god, how do I get to play with it?

This morning, the 32 teams for the 2010 World Cup were drawn in to their eight qualifying groups.
There's always a lot of talk about a "Group of Death" for the World Cup, so I decided to try and analyze the draw a little mathematically.

The strongest group, from top to bottom, is group H. The lowest ranked team in the group is Honduras (31.5), and the average ranking for the four teams in the group is 17.5.

Here's the groups, in order of the average ranking of the teams in that group. Lower numbers mean stronger teams:

Average ranking of all teams in group
Group H: 17.5
Group E: 19.625
Group D: 20.25
Group C: 23.25
Group B: 26
Group G: 27
Group A: 29
Group F: 39.5

The Italians are the lowest ranked of the seeded teams, other than the host nation South Africa, but they get the easiest group overall in Group F.

But overall strength isn't the best way to evaluate the Group of Death. The top two teams from each group advance. So, which Groups have the biggest gap between the second and third ranked teams in the group?

Delta between second and third ranked team in group
Group A: 3.5
Group B: 5.5
Group C: 20
Group D: 5.5
Group E: 10
Group F: 18
Group G: 5.5
Group H: 12

A couple things pop out here. The USA was drawn in with England in Group C, but it a clear second ranked team in the group. The US team is ranked 15, and the Slovenia team is the third best in the group, at 35th. You'd hope that the US would be able to advance with that large a gap between second and third. Paraguay also has a big gap in Group F over the third-ranked Slovakia team.

How about another way to look at it? What's the ranking of the third-best team in each group?

Ranking of third-place team in group
Group A: Mexico, 17
Group B: Nigeria, 28
Group C: Slovenia, 35
Group D: Australia, 22
Group E: Denmark, 23
Group F: Slovakia, 42
Group G: Cote d'Ivorie, 12.5
Group H: Switzerland, 24.5

It's the Ivory Coast that's gotten the toughest draw this World Cup, by far. They've got the tenth-best ranking in my crude little system, but are third-best in their group, after Brazil and Portugal. In most other groups, they'd be a favorite to move on, but in Group G, it's going to be tough.

It's a brutally hot morning here at the Villages, one of the biggest retirement communities on the planet. But the saunalike central Florida weather doesn't slow down the 77,000 seniors who call this place home.

On the nine softball fields around the development, smack-talking eightysomethings try to leg out a base hit. Graceful swimmers slice through the water in glittering pools. Near the Bait Shop bar in one of the immaculate town squares, line dancers shimmy in unison.

Villagers play hard. And they drive ... well, they drive kinda slow. Because the ride of choice at the Villages isn't a Lincoln or a Cadillac. It's a golf cart.

The diminutive vehicles are the primary mode of transportation for daily life here. Residents can drive them just about everywhere they need to go. They whiz along 87 miles of trails, from the Walmart to the town squares, from the hospital to the archery range. When they have to cross the six-lane US 27/US 441 highway, no sweat—they take the specially built golf cart overpass. "We don't like to call them our golf carts," a retiree named Warren Cromer tells me. "They're our second car."

I'm just tickled that my feature story on Nike+ and the data-driven revolution in athletics is the cover story this month at Wired.
I think it's probably the best thing I've ever written -- the product of months of research, thinking, and draft after draft. Here's one of my favorite sections:

The Nike+ sensor consists of just three parts. There's an accelerometer that detects when your foot hits and leaves the ground, calculating that all-important contact time. There's a transmitter that sends the information to a receiver, one that's either clipped onto an iPod nano or built into the second-generation iPod touch. And there's the battery. That's what Nike+ is.

What's more interesting is what Nike+ isn't. There's no GPS that automatically tracks your routes—if you want to map your run, you have to do it manually on the Nike site. There's no heart rate monitor, so even though you know how far and how fast you've traveled, you don't know what level of cardiovascular exertion it required. "We really wanted to separate ourselves from that sort of very technical, geeky side of things," Tchao says. "Everyone understands speed and distance."

In other words, Nike+ isn't a perfect tool; it wasn't designed to be. But it's good enough, and more crucially, it's simple. Nike learned a huge lesson from Apple: The iPod wasn't a massive hit because it was the most powerful music player on the market but because it offered the easiest, most streamlined user experience.

But that simple, dual-variable tracking can lead to novel insights, especially once you have so many people feeding in data: The most popular day for running is Sunday, and most Nike+ users tend to work out in the evening. After the holidays, there's a huge increase in the number of goals that runners set; this past January, they set 312 percent more goals than the month before.

There's something even deeper. Nike has discovered that there's a magic number for a Nike+ user: five. If someone uploads only a couple of runs to the site, they might just be trying it out. But once they hit five runs, they're massively more likely to keep running and uploading data. At five runs, they've gotten hooked on what their data tells them about themselves.

Huge thanks to all the people at Nike who took time to talk to me, and everyone at Wired who made it a much better story -- especially Thomas Goetz, whose editing and advice was crucial in the story's success.

A big week around here. First, last Thursday, Wired won three National Magazine Awards. We won General Excellence, Design, and Magazine Section, for the front of the book Start section.
Here's a quote from the judges' comment on the GenEx award:

In its 16th year, Wired continues to evolve as the most innovative and sophisticated guide to how technology is changing the world. Ranging across business, entertainment, science and culture, its mix is surprising and intuitive, articulated with graphic attitude and old-fashioned reporting. Wired is sometimes hilarious, often ironic, relentlessly smart and always engaging.

I'm just so darn proud to work here, with such amazingly talented people. And getting recognized by your peers is really gratifying.

And if that wasn't enough, the Alinea cookbook, which I wrote for, won the James Beard Foundation Award for the best book about "Cooking from a Professional Point of View." We beat out the latest from Thomas Keller and Heston Blumenthal, which is hard to imagine.

Thanks to Grant and Nick for pulling me into the project, and for making it so fun and so rewarding.